What they say: Alibaba chief scientist Luo Si says it “means objective questions such as ‘what causes rain’ can now be answered with high accuracy by machines,” and plans to use the technology in real-world applications like customer service.

But: This isn’t comprehension the way humans think of it. It’s neat, but the AI doesn’t really understand what it reads—it doesn’t know what “British rock group Coldplay” really is, besides it being the answer to the Super Bowl question. And there are far harder language problems that humans still beat computers at.